AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 Released With New Extensions + Navi 14 Support

AMD's Vulkan driver team has today volleyed their third open-source "AMDVLK" code drop of the quarter. This AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 driver comes with new extensions as well as Navi 14 enablement.

Supported by AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 is VK_EXT_pipeline_creation_feedback and VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation. EXT_pipeline_creation_feedback provides a feedback loop to the application/engine for use with pipeline caching as the principal benefit while the EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation extension is for allowing behavior similar to Direct3D's HLSL discard instruction.

This AMDVLK Vulkan driver code drop also provides Navi 14 support with the pending Radeon RX 5500 graphics cards and other hardware on the way. The AMDVLK Navi 14 support goes along with the kernel driver support in Linux 5.4 and newer. The alternative RADV Mesa Vulkan driver meanwhile has had Navi 14 support for a while and is in Mesa 19.3.

The AMDVLK update also has performance tuning to help Total War: Warhammer II and DiRT 4. There are also various conformance test fixes and the Vulkan headers updated against v1.1.127.

Download the new AMDVLK release at GitHub. I'll have some new AMDVLK vs. RADV vs. RADV ACO benchmarks on Phoronix soon.